What is SEO?

If I can help it, this is the last time I write about what is SEO and what it means for small business.

Why? because the conversation about SEO (for Search Engine Optimization) has been the single most irritating one I’ve been forced to have in my many years as an online marketing consultant.

Why is it irritating? While I’ll gladly perform search engine optimization as part of my work as online marketing consultant, I’ve seen the conversation about SEO derail many otherwise great online marketing opportunities.

For instance, if you’re searching for “What is SEO” you’re probably understandably curious, but if you’re like many small business owners, freelancers, and even some bloggers, you’re probably obsessed with it. You probably have SEObsession.

I have made the point before that SEO is like the phone book, no matter what you do, at the end of the day you’re still passively waiting for someone to call or walk into your business.

Why are you concerned with SEO? Do you even know if SEO is what you need? Should it be your main focus? Is your business missing out on better opportunities in Local, Social, Email, PPC, or even old school, offline marketing because you think SEO will be the answer to your business success?

That’s what I want to help you to figure out. SEObsession can hurt your goals.

An Example On How SEO Can Hurt

More than two years ago I wrapped up a massive website project for a church-affiliated non-profit. The church I’m talking about has adherents in the millions. Surely a committed audience, partially captive Sunday mornings.

As part of the project –as in all my projects– I do a simple online marketing strategy. As part of this strategy I outlined the many campaigns and tactics they could use to engage the church base to further their goals (increase donations, and conversions to help children and families).

A couple of months ago I was volunteering at an event, consulting with people on how to improve their online presence and marketing. Lo and behold, non-profit client sits down to chat, in her words, “about SEO”.

“No. We’re not going to talk about SEO”, I said.

No. We’re not going to talk about SEO”,
I said.

I reminded her how their website’s permanent, relevant pages are as optimized as it gets. That their only on-site SEO with room for improvement was their blog, and if they weren’t taking that into consideration when planning and writing, I couldn’t help.

I asked if they had reached out to churches, for them to link from their websites with carefully planned and crafted links. She said they hadn’t.

I asked if they had reached out to churches and other church organizations to be included in their email marketing, and she said no.

I asked if they had emailed or mailed their own donor and client base to encourage them to subscribe to the blog, like them and share their posts on social media, etc. She said no.

I asked if they had placed any paid advertising (AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc.) carefully targeted to their demographic and psychographic. She said no, they had not.

Yet, here she was, wanting to “talk about SEO”. My guess is someone in the higher ups though SEO was an all too convenient method to justify online marketing.

Two years, wasted, because someone there is obsessed with SEO.

What Is SEO?

The shortest answer I know I heard from Eric Highland, a true, ethical SEO professional here in Austin. He describes SEO as “Any method that helps SERP” (search engine results page).

That’s it. Any method that results in better ranking and showing on that elusive first page of the search engine (by which I mean “Google”, of course).

What SEO Is Not

SEO is not about tricks. Like I told another data-scraping attendee at the same conference: “If it sounds like a trick, smells like a trick, and tastes like a trick, it’s a trick, and it’ll get you in trouble.”

SEO by itself is not a strategy. If your online marketing strategy relies mostly on SEO I have very bad news for you. Read more.

SEO is not a shortcut nor about shortcuts.

SEO is not free. You pay one way or another. Either you pay with enormous amounts of your time, you pay someone else to do it, or worse, you pay with penalties from the search engines for the mistakes or trickery done for your SEO.

The the gist of it is you are competing with many others, some of them SEO superpowers, for increasingly limited space in the SERP. The article is biased in favor of local SEO, yes, but as you’ve seen in my example above there are many other potential ways to get people to your website.

In the end, all SEO efforts lie somewhere the great Stephen Covey would probably call “outside your circle of influence”. SEO changes all the time. Do you have time to keep up with it?

How about conversion systems? What, don’t know what I’m talking about? In the words of Francisco Rosales, from Social Mouths, conversion is “the art of making your (website) visitors take action whether that means spending more time reading your content, buying one of your products or subscribing to your email list.”

Bottom line: If you drive a ton of traffic to a website that doesn’t convert all you did was drive a ton of traffic.

Because there is a very low barrier to entry, just about anyone that can make the claim, makes a claim they’re an SEO expert.

Let me give you a hint: If anyone claims they’ll “get you on the 1st page of Google”, or agrees they’ll do it, if you ask for it, run away. Run away and never even answer their phone call again.

The Last Draw: DIY SEO

So what do you do about SEO? Maybe you do it yourself. The thing about DIY SEO is, it can be incredibly difficult, and requires:

technical expertise

creativity

focus

SEO Is Technical

Unless you’re using a CMS like WordPress, with an industry-backed plugin like Yoast SEO, be prepared to go deep into your website’s markup. This can mean anything from pure HTML (if a static website), to serious PHP skills.

SEO Requires Creativity

This one is hard to explain, but basically you need to really think outside the box to do great SEO. How you write, how you use images, and how you make choices about what may work all affects SEO.

SEO Requires Focus

Once you have technology figured out, and feel pretty creative in your tactics, SEO will demand fierce focus. Proper SEO demands incredible attention to detail. If you lose your focus, your efforts may be worthless.

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Nando Journeyman

Hi, I’m Nando Cabán-Méndez, the “Commerce Whisperer”, an entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience in business and design, and more than 10 years in digital marketing and eCommerce.
Here at AllyOne, I use my skills and experience to help online business owners grow their business with best-of-breed eCommerce solutions.
In this blog, I share eCommerce, websites, and general digital marketing lessons from my career.
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